The Revolution Gap

Classic Communist dogma makes revolution the private preserve of those with nothing to lose but their chains: the workers. In this revolutionary spring of 1968, however, it is the students--most of them from comfortable middle-class backgrounds--who have proclaimed themselves the vanguard of a new order. Quite apart from their political impact in the streets, youthful activists are putting the theology of orthodox Communism in a curious pinch: they are revolutionaries from the wrong side of the tracks.

From the barricaded buildings of Rome University to Britain's Porton Down Microbiological Research Center, the protests of those revolutionaries continued to agitate Western Europe last week. British students held a lie-in demonstration at the chemical center, also shoved their way past campus "bulldog" proctors to demand, and win, the right to distribute freely pamphlets at Oxford. In Rome, where they began their protest by setting fire to an effigy of Charles de Gaulle, some 2,000 students held the campus until moderate students, anxious to finish exams, and armed police stormed it. The Italian Communist Party, through Theoretician Giorgio Amendola, did its best to explain the workers' failure to support student power. Reproving the students' "anarchism" and "old barricade spirit," Amendola urged young rebels to channel their energy toward the workers and noted that Lenin himself had warned "not to play with insurrection."

Poster Prose. Nowhere is the student-worker rift so potentially embarrassing as in Communist "worker states" themselves, and last week, in Yugoslavia, the revolution gap appeared. It began in the now familiar Paris pattern, when police used water cannons and clubs to turn back Belgrade university students from an overcrowded pop concert; next day, some 2,000 students occupied the campus in downtown Belgrade. Also as usual, they advertised their grievances on signs and banners.

The poster prose of revolution, alarming to a Western chief executive, is a particularly cutting indictment of a Communist leader, and students were in no mood to spare Yugoslav Party Boss Josip Broz Tito. They renamed their school "the Red University of Karl Marx" and demanded an "end to socialist princes." Across town, where students had also occupied the Institute of Technology, posters urged that "workers and students unite against bureaucracy," and--the greatest slap of all--pictured the silken top hat of plutocracy with the party's red star on it.

Frankly bidding for worker support in their cause, the students demanded university admission for more students from working-class backgrounds. Tito, in order to head off any such potent alliance of workers and students as that in France last month, ordered plastic-helmeted militiamen to patrol outside the university and banned all public demonstrations. He was also quick to throw a bone in the workers' direction, ordering the minimum wage of $12 a month doubled immediately. Within hours, dozens of published messages poured into student headquarters from factory Communist committees, most agreeing vaguely to aims of reform but all roundly condemning activist methods. "We invite you to unmask instigators," wrote the workers of a furniture factory. "We, the creators of income and direct producers, have a right to ask this."

Away from Marcuse. That plea for the status quo was just what can be expected, says Radical Philosopher Herbert Marcuse, the California-based evangelist of nonworker revolution who is one of the heroes of the European student rebels. Modern technocratic workers, whether they labor in Communist or capitalistic nations, he says, are too wrapped up in the system to turn on it--and increasingly, as student activists put out calls to the factory for a show of solidarity, they prove him right. Marcuse's answer is to wage revolution with small groups of intellectuals and students. But more than one campus commando has reached the same conclusion as Juergen Horiemann, 26-year-old West German S.D.S. (Socialist Student League) leader. "We simply are not a power factor in society," he says. "We cannot alone carry out our cultural revolution."

The result on many West European campuses, despite the continued poster popularity of Marcuse's grizzled visage, has been a swing away from his thought to a fresh classroom consciousness of Marx. In West Germany, where West Berlin's Neukoelln factory quarters became so hostile to anti-Viet Nam demonstrators last winter that one was badly beaten, S.D.S. activists are trying to reconstruct workers with a missionary effort. Groups of students drop in on worker pubs, strike up conversations over checker matches, and gradually set up small groups that aim to determine their common anticapitalistic grievances. However, with only 50 groups (20 to 60 members each) now functioning, and considerable worker skepticism remaining, their revolution may be a long time coming.

Collective Sigh. Though Marcuse claims to be basically Marxist, he has also fallen under attack in the Soviet Union, where the wave of European student revolutions has met with anything but comradely applause. In a fiercely worded attack on "werewolves" who are "blasphemously using Marx's name," the Russian party organ Pravda recently accused Marcuse of trying to "introduce confusion in the ranks of the fighters against the old world." In fact, Pravda has a good deal more than confusion to worry about: today's young rebels against the Establishment include in their targets the bureaucratic structure of Communist states and the leadership in Red parties that bid for power in coalition governments. This again pits established Communist leadership against the students. Far from encouraging the student-inspired struggle against "capitalistic society" in France, the Communists in France and in the Kremlin breathed a collective sigh of relief when Charles de Gaulle restored order in Paris.

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